Blaise Pascal | Biography, Facts, & Inventions | Britannica.com Blaise Pascal Werner Heisenberg Blaise Pascal, (born June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand, France —died August 19, 1662, Paris), French mathematician , physicist , religious philosopher , and master of prose. He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities , formulated what came to be known as Pascal’s principle of pressure , and propagated a religious doctrine that taught the experience of God through the heart rather than through reason. The establishment of his principle of intuitionism had an impact on such later philosophers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri Bergson and also on the Existentialists . Blaise Pascal, engraving by Henry Hoppner Meyer, 1833. © Georgios Kollidas/Fotolia Pascal’s life to the Port-Royal years Pascal’s father, Étienne Pascal, was presiding judge of the tax court at Clermont-Ferrand . His mother died in 1626, and in 1631 the family moved to Paris .

Étienne, who was respected as a mathematician, devoted himself henceforth to the education of his children. While his sister Jacqueline (born in 1625) figured as an infant prodigy in literary circles, Blaise proved himself no less precocious in mathematics. In 1640 he wrote an essay on conic sections, Essai pour les coniques, based on his study of the now classical work of Girard Desargues on synthetic projective geometry . The young man’s work, which was highly successful in the world of mathematics, aroused the envy of no less a personage than the great French Rationalist and mathematician René Descartes . Between 1642 and 1644, Pascal conceived and constructed a calculating device, the Pascaline , to help his father—who in 1639 had been appointed intendant (local administrator) at Rouen—in his tax computations. The machine was regarded by Pascal’s contemporaries as his main claim to fame, and with reason, for in a sense it was the first digital calculator since it operated by counting integers .

The significance of this contribution explains the youthful pride that appears in his dedication of the machine to the chancellor of France, Pierre Seguier , in 1644. Until 1646 the Pascal family held strictly Roman Catholic principles, though they often substituted l’honnêteté (“polite respectability”) for inward religion . An illness of his father, however, brought Blaise into contact with a more profound expression of religion, for he met two disciples of the abbé de Saint-Cyran, who, as director of the convent of Port-Royal , had brought the austere moral and theological conceptions of Jansenism into the life and thought of the convent. Jansenism was a 17th-century form of Augustinianism in the Roman Catholic Church . It repudiated free will , accepted predestination , and taught that divine grace , rather than good works, was the key to salvation . The convent at Port-Royal had become the centre for the dissemination of the doctrine. Pascal himself was the first to feel the necessity of entirely turning away from the world to God, and he won his family over to the spiritual life in 1646.

His letters indicate that for several years he was his family’s spiritual adviser, but the conflict within himself—between the world and ascetic life—was not yet resolved. Absorbed again in his scientific interests, he tested the theories of Galileo and Evangelista Torricelli (an Italian physicist who discovered the principle of the barometer ). To do so, he reproduced and amplified experiments on atmospheric pressure by constructing mercury barometers and measuring air pressure , both in Paris and on the top of a mountain overlooking Clermont-Ferrand. These tests paved the way for further studies in hydrodynamics and hydrostatics . While experimenting, Pascal invented the syringe and created the hydraulic press , an instrument based upon the principle that became known as Pascal’s principle : pressure applied to a confined liquid is transmitted undiminished through the liquid in all directions regardless of the area to which the pressure is applied. His publications on the problem of the vacuum (1647–48) added to his reputation.

When he fell ill from overwork, his doctors advised him to seek distractions; but what has been described as Pascal’s “worldly period” (1651–54) was, in fact, primarily a period of intense scientific work, during which he composed treatises on the equilibrium of liquid solutions , on the weight and density of air, and on the arithmetic triangle: Traité de l’équilibre des liqueurs et de la pesanteur de la masse de l’air (Eng. trans., The Physical Treatises of Pascal, 1937) and also his Traité du triangle arithmétique. In the last treatise , a fragment of the De Alea Geometriae, he laid the foundations for the calculus of probabilities. By the end of 1653, however, he had begun to feel religious scruples; and the “night of fire,” an intense, perhaps mystical “conversion” that he experienced on November 23, 1654, he believed to be the beginning of a new life.

He entered Port-Royal in January 1655, and though he never became one of the solitaires, he thereafter wrote only at their request and never again published in his own name. The two works for which he is chiefly known, Les Provinciales and the Pensées, date from the years of his life spent at Port-Royal. Blaise Pascal (centre) conducting experiments with a mercury barometer at a tower in Paris, … © Photos.com/Thinkstock Pascal, red crayon drawing by Jean Domat, c. 1649. In the Bibliothèque Nationale, … Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Les Provinciales Scientists Ponder Menopause in Killer Whales Written in defense of Antoine Arnauld , an opponent of the Jesuits and a defender of Jansenism who was on trial before the faculty of theology in Paris for his controversial religious works, Pascal’s 18 Lettres écrites par Louis de Montalte à un provincial deal with divine grace and the ethical code of the Jesuits . They are better known as Les Provinciales (“The Provincial Letters”).

They included a blow against the relaxed morality that the Jesuits were said to teach and that was the weak point in their controversy with Port-Royal; Pascal quotes freely Jesuit dialogues and discrediting quotations from their own works, sometimes in a spirit of derision , sometimes with indignation. In the two last letters, dealing with the question of grace, Pascal proposed a conciliatory position that was later to make it possible for Port-Royal to subscribe to the “Peace of the Church,” a temporary cessation of the conflict over Jansenism, in 1668. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies The Provinciales were an immediate success, and their popularity has remained undiminished. This they owe primarily to their form, in which for the first time bombast and tedious rhetoric are replaced by variety, brevity , tautness, and precision of style; as Nicolas Boileau , the founder of French literary criticism , recognized, they marked the beginning of modern French prose. Something of their popularity, moreover, in fashionable, Protestant , or skeptical circles, must be attributed to the violence of their attack on the Jesuits.

In England they have been most widely read when Roman Catholicism has seemed a threat to the Church of England . Yet they have also helped Catholicism to rid itself of laxity; and, in 1678, Pope Innocent XI himself condemned half of the propositions that Pascal had denounced earlier. Thus, the Provinciales played a decisive part in promoting a return to inner religion and helped to secure the eventual triumph of the ideas set forth in Antoine Arnauld’s treatise De la fréquente communion (1643), in which he protested against the idea that the profligate could atone for continued sin by frequent communion without repentance, a thesis that thereafter remained almost unchallengeable until the French church felt the repercussion of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which had granted religious freedom to French Protestants) in 1685. Whereas the Jesuits seemed to represent a Counter-Reformation predominantly concerned with orthodoxy and obedience to ecclesiastical authority, the Provinciales advocated a more spiritual approach, emphasizing the soul’s union with the Mystical Body of Christ through charity.

Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Further, by rejecting any double standard of morality and the distinction between counsel and precept, Pascal aligned himself with those who believe the ideal of evangelical perfection to be inseparable from the Christian life. Although there was nothing original in these opinions, Pascal nevertheless stamped them with the passionate conviction of a man in love with the absolute, of a man who saw no salvation apart from a heartfelt desire for the truth, together with a love of God that works continually toward destroying all self-love. For Pascal, morality cannot be separated from spirituality. Moreover, his own spiritual development can be traced in the Provinciales. The religious sense in them becomes progressively refined after the first letters, in which the tone of ridicule is smart rather than charitable. Pensées Exploring France: Fact or Fiction? Pascal finally decided to write his work of Christian apologetics , Apologie de la religion chrétienne, as a consequence of his meditations on miracles and other proofs of Christianity . The work remained unfinished at his death. Between the summers of 1657 and 1658, he put together most of the notes and fragments that editors have published under the inappropriate title Pensées (“Thoughts”).

In the Apologie, Pascal shows the man without grace to be an incomprehensible mixture of greatness and abjectness, incapable of truth or of reaching the supreme good to which his nature nevertheless aspires. A religion that accounts for these contradictions, which he believed philosophy and worldliness fail to do, is for that very reason “to be venerated and loved.” The indifference of the skeptic , Pascal wrote, is to be overcome by means of the “ wager ”: if God does not exist, the skeptic loses nothing by believing in him; but if he does exist, the skeptic gains eternal life by believing in him. Pascal insists that men must be brought to God through Jesus Christ alone, because a creature could never know the infinite if Jesus had not descended to assume the proportions of man’s fallen state. Trending Topics Open Door policy The second part of the work applies the Augustinian theory of allegorical interpretation to the biblical types (figuratifs); reviews the rabbinical texts, the persistence of true religion, the work of Moses , and the proofs concerning Jesus Christ’s God-like role; and, finally, gives a picture of the primitive church and the fulfillment of the prophecies.

The Apologie (Pensées) is a treatise on spirituality. Pascal was not interested in making converts if they were not going to be saints . Pascal’s apologetics, though it has stood the test of time, is primarily addressed to individuals of his own acquaintance. To convert his libertine friends, he looked for arguments in their favourite authors: in Michel de Montaigne , in the Skeptic Pierre Charron , in the Epicurean Pierre Gassendi , and in Thomas Hobbes , an English political philosopher. For Pascal, Skepticism was but a stage. Modernist theologians in particular have tried to make use of his main contention , that “man is infinitely more than man,” in isolation from his other contention, that man’s wretchedness is explicable only as the effect of a Fall, about which a man can learn what he needs to know from history. In so doing, they sacrifice the second part of the Apologie to the first, keeping the philosophy while losing the exegesis . For Pascal as for St. Paul , Jesus Christ is the second Adam , inconceivable without the first.

Finally, too, Pascal expressly admitted that his psychological analyses were not by themselves sufficient to exclude a “philosophy of the absurd”; to do so, it is necessary to have recourse to the convergence of these analyses with the “lines of fact” concerning revelation, this convergence being too extraordinary not to appear as the work of providence to an anguished seeker after truth (qui cherche en gémissant). He was next again involved in scientific work. First, the “Messieurs de Port-Royal” themselves asked for his help in composing the Élements de géométrie; and second, it was suggested that he should publish what he had discovered about cycloid curves, a subject on which the greatest mathematicians of the time had been working. Once more fame aroused in him feelings of self-esteem; but from February 1659, illness brought him back to his former frame of mind, and he composed the “prayer for conversion” that the English clergymen Charles and John Wesley , who founded the Methodist Church , were later to regard so highly. Scarcely capable of regular work, he henceforth gave himself over to helping the poor and to the ascetic and devotional life.

He took part intermittently, however, in the disputes to which the “Formulary”—a document condemning five propositions of Jansenism that, at the demand of the church authorities, had to be signed before a person could receive the sacraments—gave rise. Finally a difference of opinion with the theologians of Port-Royal led him to withdraw from controversy, though he did not sever his relations with them. Pascal died in 1662 after suffering terrible pain, probably from carcinomatous meningitis following a malignant ulcer of the stomach . He was assisted by a non-Jansenist parish priest. Assessment At once a physicist , a mathematician, an eloquent publicist in the Provinciales, and an inspired artist in the Apologie and in his private notes, Pascal was embarrassed by the very abundance of his talents. It has been suggested that it was his too concrete turn of mind that prevented his discovering the infinitesimal calculus ; and in some of the Provinciales the mysterious relations of human beings with God are treated as if they were a geometrical problem.

But these considerations are far outweighed by the profit that he drew from the multiplicity of his gifts; his religious writings are rigorous because of his scientific training; and his love of the concrete emerges no less from the stream of quotations in the Provinciales than from his determination to reject the vigorous method of attack that he had used so effectively in his Apologie. Top Geniuses Of All Time - List of 50 Brilliant Minds | 4 Mind 4 Life: Mental Health Tips 4 Mind 4 Life: Mental Health Tips Created by Drew | : Boost Brain Power 1) Albert Einstein – Albert Einstein is a name that comes to mind first when thinking of geniuses. Einstein’s brain was found to be deficient in certain parts, but extraordinarily powerful in others. Another trait of Albert’s brain was the fact that he had a much larger corpus callosum than the average man. The corpus callosum connects the right and left hemispheres and allows them to successfully transfer information back and forth (communicate with one another). Einstein has received the Nobel Prize in physics, was named “Person Of The Century” by Time Magazine, and has contributed phenomenal theories to the world of science (i.e.

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He has had a huge influence on philosophy and is widely accepted as one of the twentieth century’s best philosophers. Wittengenstein published 2 books and both were highly influential in philosophy. 30) Socrates – Socrates is regarded as one of the best ancient greek philosophers of all time. As teacher of Plato, he has been associated with highly advanced thinking during his time. His work continues to form much of the foundation for the study of philosophy today. Socrates has made important contributions to the study of logic and writings, and has provided a lot of groundwork that much of the Western civilization has followed. 31) Linus Pauling – Linus Pauling was a peace activist, scientist, author, and teacher. Pauling is regarded as one of the most influential chemists in history and was one of the most important scientists of all time. He was one of the pioneers to work in the study of molecular biology and quantum chemistry. He has been awarded more than 1 Nobel Prize and is one of only 2 individuals to receive them for different fields.

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Pascal’s contributions included: mechanical calculators, concepts of pressure, concepts of vacuum, and the study of fluids. In literature, Pascal is regarded as one of the most important authors of the French classical period. His name (Pascal) has been given to the SI unit of pressure, some programming language, and Pascal’s law. 35) Galileo Galilei – Galileo Galilei was a legendery astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and philosopher. He played a major role in the scientific revolution. His achievements include the first studies of uniformly accelerated motion, improvements to the telescope, and astronomical observations. Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy”, the “father of modern physics”, the “father of science”, and “the Father of Modern Science.” With his discoveries and studies, Galileo was able to display his brilliance. 36) Martin Luther – Martin Luther was a German professor, a monk, theologian, and church reformer. Luther’s theology challenged the authority of the church by stating that the Bible is the only infallible source of religious authority and that all baptized Christians are a priesthood of believers.

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42) Garry Kasparov – Garry Kasparov was a former World Chess Champion, writer, and political activist. Kasparov was a candidate for the Russian presidential race of 2008. Kasparov holds the all-time highest chess rating of 2851 and records for consecutive tournament victories. 43) John Stuart Mill – John Stuart Mill largely influenced British thought and politics in the 19th century. His large number of works include: texts in logic, economics, social and political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and religion. John Stuart Mill is recognized as one of the most intelligent men of his time and is regarded as one of the smartest men of all time. 44) Rene Descartes – Rene Descartes was an influential philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer. Descartes has been given the title “Father of Modern Philosophy,” and has contributed a lot to Western philosophy. His writings are still being studied today and he has had a huge influence in mathematics. Rene was a key figure in the scientific revolution and was able to share his incredible insights with others.

45) George Washington – George Washington was the first President of the United States, and lead the U.S. continental Army to defeat the British in the Revolutionary war. Washington is viewed as a symbol of the United States and republican party. He has been consistently ranked by citizens as one of the greatest presidents of the United States. 46) Miguel de Cervantes – Miguel de Cervantes was a Spanish novelist, poet, painter and playwright. He is one of the most influential and important people in literature and the leader of culture in 16th century Spain. Cervantes’ novel “Don Quixote” is considered a classic of Western literature and has been ranked among the best novels ever written. Miguel de Cervantes’ work is considered among the most important in all of literature! 47) Francois Marie-Arouet – Commonly known by the pen-name Voltaire, Francois Marie-Arouet was a French Enlightenment writer, essayist, and philosopher. He was known for his wit, defense of civil liberties, and philosophy. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform and was one of several Enlightenment figures whose works and ideas influenced important thinkers of both the American and French Revolutions.

48) Baruch de Spinoza – Baruch de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher that was very proficient in science. Most of Spinoza’s work was not recognized until after his death. Today, Spinoza is regarded as one of the greatest 17th century philosophers. His work in philosophy laid the foundation for the 18th century Enlightenment. 49) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Leibniz was a German polymath who is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers. Liebniz invented calculus , and his version is widely used. He also discovered the binary system, the structure of modern computer architectures. He was, along with Rene Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, one of the 3 greatest 17th century philosophers. He also made major contributions to physics, technology, and made anticipations that surfaced much later in biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, and linguistics. Liebniz also wrote about politics, law, ethics, theology, and history. 50) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer whose works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, humanism, and science.

Goethe was a key figure in German literature and the movement of Weimar Classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Goethe is the inventor of the concept of “world literature,” having taken great interest in the literatures of England Blaise Pascal - Theologian, Philosopher, Physicist, Scientist, Mathematician - Biography.com Blaise Pascal Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher, who laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities. IN THESE GROUPS European Synopsis Mathematician Blaise Pascal was born on June 19, 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand, France. In the 1640s he invented the Pascaline, an early calculator, and further validated Evangelista Torricelli's theory concerning the cause of barometrical variations. In the 1650s, Pascal laid the foundation of probability theory with Pierre de Fermat and published the theological work Les Provinciales, a groundbreaking series of letters that defended his Jansenist faith. Pascal is also widely known for his body of notes posthumously released as the Pensées. He died in Paris on August 19, 1662.

Background and Early Life Inventor, mathematician, physicist and theological writer Blaise Pascal, born on June 19, 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, France, was the third of four children and only son to Etienne and Antoinette Pascal. His mother passed away when Blaise was just a toddler and he became exceptionally close to his two sisters Gilberte and Jacqueline. His father, Etienne, was a tax collector and talented mathematician. Etienne moved the family to Paris in 1631. He had decided to educate Blaise—a child prodigy—at home so he could design an unorthodox curriculum and make sure that Blaise was able to express his own innate curiosity. It's also believed that Blaise may have been educated at home due to issues around his health. Ironically, Etienne omitted mathematics from his son's early curriculum out of concern that Blaise would become so fascinated with geometry that he wouldn’t be able to focus on classical subjects. The beginning of Blaise’s education was geared toward languages, especially Latin and Greek.

Even so, Etienne's plan backfired: The fact that mathematics was a forbidden topic made the subject even more interesting to the inquisitive boy, who at the age of 12 began exploring geometry on his own. He made up his own terminology, not having learned official mathematical terms, and quickly managed to work out that the sum of a triangle's angles are equal to two right angles. Mystic Hexagram and Religious Conversion Etienne was impressed. In answer to Blaise's unswerving fascination, his father permitted him to read the works of ancient Greek mathematician Euclid. Etienne also allowed Blaise to accompany him to meetings at Mersenne's Academy in Paris. It was there, at age 16, that Blaise presented a number of his early theorems, including his Mystic Hexagram, to some of the premier mathematical thinkers of the time. After a bit of political tumult, the Pascal family drew up stakes once again in 1640. They moved to Rouen, France, where Blaise's father had been appointed the previous year to collect taxes. In 1640, Pascal also published his first written work, Essay on Conic Sections.

The writings constituted an important leap forward in projective geometry, which involved transferring a 3-D object onto a 2-D field. In 1646, Etienne was seriously injured in a fall that resulted in a broken hip, rendering him housebound. The accident created a shift in the family's religious beliefs, as the Pascals had never fully embraced local Jesuit ideas. After Etienne's accident, he received medical visits from two brothers who were also followers of Jansenism, a particular denomination within the Catholic Church. Their influence, presumably coupled with trauma over Etienne's health, led the family to convert. Blaise became devoutly religious and sister Jacqueline eventually becoming a Jansenist nun. Inventions and Discoveries In 1642, inspired by the idea of making his father's job of calculating taxes easier, Blaise Pascal started work on a calculator dubbed the Pascaline. (German polymath William Schickard had developed and manufactured an earlier version of the calculator in 1623.) The Pascaline was a numerical wheel calculator with movable dials, each representing a numerical digit.

The invention, however, was not without its glitches: There was a discrepancy between the calculator's design and the structure of French currency at the time. Pascal continued to work on improving the device, with 50 prototypes produced by 1652, but the Pascaline was never a big seller. In 1648, Pascal starting writing more of his theorems in The Generation of Conic Sections, but he pushed the work aside until the following decade. At the end of the 1640s, Pascal temporarily focused his experiments on the physical sciences. Following in Evangelista Torricelli’s footsteps, Pascal experimented with how atmospheric pressure could be estimated in terms of weight. In 1648, by having his brother-in-law take readings of the barometric pressure at various altitudes on a mountain (Pascal was too poor of health to make the trek himself), he validated Torricelli's theory concerning the cause of barometrical variations. In the 1650s, Pascal set about trying to create a perpetual motion machine, the purpose of which was to produce more energy than it used.

In the process, he stumbled upon an accidental invention and in 1655 Pascal's roulette machine was born. Aptly, he derived its name from the French word for "little wheel." Overlapping his work on the roulette machine was Pascal's correspondence with mathematical theorist Pierre de Fermat, which began in 1654. Through their letters discussing gambling and Pascal's own experiments, he found that there is a fixed likelihood of a particular outcome when it comes to the roll of the dice. This discovery was the basis of the mathematical theory of probability, with Pascal's writings on the subject published posthumously. Although the specific dates are uncertain, Pascal also reportedly invented a primitive form of the wristwatch. It was an informal invention to say the least: The mathematician was known to strap his pocket watch to his wrist with a piece of string, presumably for the sake of convenience while tinkering with other inventions. Noted Literary Works Antoine Arnauld was a Sorbonne theologian who defended Jansenist beliefs, and thus found his position under fire from papal doctrine and university faculty.

Pascal wrote a series of pseudonymous open letters from 1656-57 that ultimately came to be known as Les Provinciales. The writings defended Arnauld and critiqued Jesuit beliefs while exhibiting a groundbreaking style, relying on relatively tight, sharp prose with irony and satire. Starting in 1657, Pascal had also begun to write notes that would be posthumously organized and published as the Pensées, going into great detail about the contours of the thinker's position on his faith. The Pensées is an extensive work with assertions that might be considered controversial to some in contemporary times. The most oft cited portion of the collection is Pascal's famed "Wager," in which he states that it is more advantageous for religious skeptics to embrace a belief in God as they ultimately have more to lose if a higher power is revealed after death.

Death and Legacy Pascal, a complex personality, was described by biographer Donald Adamson as "precocious, stubbornly persevering, a perfectionist, pugnacious to the point of bullying ruthlessness yet seeking to be meek and humble." Pascal had struggled with insomnia and a digestive disorder from the time he was a teen, and as such he was known to have suffered greatly from pain throughout his life. Over the years, Pascal’s constant work took a further toll on his already fragile health. Pascal died of a malignant stomach tumor at his sister Gilberte's home in Paris on August 19, 1662. By then, the tumor had metastasized in his brain. He was 39 years old. Pascal's inventions and discoveries have been instrumental to developments in the fields of geometry, physics and computer science, influencing 17th-century visionaries like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton . During the 20th century, the Pascal (Pa) unit was named after the thinker in honor of his contributions to the understanding of atmospheric pressure and how it could be estimated in terms of weight.

In the late 1960s, Swiss computer scientist Nicklaus Wirth invented a computer language and insisted on naming it after Pascal. This was Wirth's way of memorializing Pascal's invention of the Pascaline, one of the earliest forms of the modern computer. Fact Check We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us ! Citation Information

Question: Which 17th century French philosopher and religious thinker, has given his name to the SI unit of pressure?
Answer: PASCAL